The New York Botanical Garden has completed cataloging and imaging its approximately 92,000 vascular plant type
specimens. Basic information from all types in these families has been
captured in the database, but some of the records are more complete
than others.

The digitization of the vascular plant type specimens was funded by a grant from the Xerox Foundation. Students in the Biomedical Photographic Communications Department of the Rochester Institute of Technology and Xerox provided technical assistance. The Imaging Manual created by RIT can be downloaded by anyone insterested in learning more about the technical aspects behind our project.

Note that not all paratypes are indicated as such on specimen annotation labels
(they are often only noted as "type" or "cotype"), and known paratypes
are not included in this catalog. To find specimens of paratypes, use the Quick Search
option of our Search
All Catalogs page.

To search the Vascular Plant Types Catalog by the name of the plant
(family, genus, species, or subspecific epithet), author, collector,
collector number, barcode number, or type status, use the Quick Search
box below. To search one or more specific fields in the database,
choose the Advanced Search.

Basic Search

Advanced Search

Division

Family (most recent determination)

Scientific Name (most recent determination)

Searches the genus, species, infraspecies, and author abbreviations of a name.

Genus (most recent determination)

Species (most recent determination)

Subspecies/Variety/Form (most recent determination)

Family (all determinations)

Scientific Name (all determinations)

Searches the genus, species, infraspecies, and author abbreviations of a name.

Searches in the Virtual Herbarium are by default word-based. The fastest searches are made by using whole words as the criteria. Wildcard characters can be used to find partial words, but search times will be significantly longer.

Use an asterisk (*) as a substitute for any number of characters in a word. (Example: "South*" in the Province/State field will return specimen records from "South Australia," "South Carolina,"etc.)

Use an exclamation mark before a word to specifically exclude that word from the search. (Example: "Euphorbia" in the Genus field and "!robusta" in the Species field will return all records of Euphorbia except Euphorbia robusta.)

Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases. Words not enclosed by quotation marks will be used to return records with all of the words, but not necessarily in the order typed.

*The Scientific Name field searches the genus, species, infraspecies, and author abbreviations of a name.
Example 1: the search term "wrightii" finds specimens of Polypodium wrightii,Ficus wrightii, etc.
Example 2: the term "Stafleu" finds specimen records of numerous taxa described by Frans A. Stafleu.

Browse the alphabetical list of available families below. Click on a family name to see a checklist of taxa for that family. Please note that search times are proportional to the number of records in a family. Clicking on a family link below requires that the database be searched and the list of taxa be generated dynamically. This will take some time for those families with many records (i.e., hundreds or thousands).